16 February 2016. A World to Win News Service. In an alarming development that illustrates how Europe is adopting police and even military solutions to what it sees as its “migrant crisis” – and reflects the real underlying world crises – Nato has sent warships to the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey.

This decision, not even hinted at publicly until the eve of a meeting of Nato defence ministers on 11 February, was implemented overnight. Within twenty hours, one ship each from Germany, Turkey and Canada was in place. Two or three other warships are expected to join them, perhaps from Greece, the UK and Denmark, a country proud of its heritage from the Vikings whose ships once plundered this sea and that now plunders asylum seekers’ personal possessions.

Even more alarming than the presence of these warships in the Aegean is the degree to which its mission has been left deliberately murky.

Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told the media that “this is not about stopping or pushing back refugee boats.” Nato Supreme Commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, whose position reflects US domination of the alliance, said that deploying the ships was a political decision and defining their mission remains part of the “military work” yet to be done.

What these ships are not being sent to do is save people from drowning, as more than 800 did in the Aegean last year and 409 in the first five weeks of 2016 alone, according to the International Organization for Migration. In cases where volunteers have tried to help boats reach Greece safely (for instance, firemen from Italy), they have been arrested.

Mare Nostrum, the Italian operation in the Mediterranean in 2013-14 that rescued 150,000 migrants in danger of drowning, was cancelled because it was deemed to “encourage” people to leave North Africa for Europe in tiny boats. It was replaced by Operation Triton, conducted by Frontex (the EU border police) using patrol boats with no room for passengers or provisions for emergency medical care. People plucked out of the cold water remained on deck and many died of exposure before reaching land. Thousands more died unrescued because the operation was designed to keep them from Europe’s shores and do little if their boats capsized out at sea.

Then Germany, whose population is ageing and shrinking despite the absorption of half a million immigrants from ex-Yugoslavia, announced its willingness to take in a million Syrians. But now the doors are swinging shut again. Blaming anti-immigrant public opinion that has been carefully stoked and events like the New Years eve attacks on women in Cologne as an excuse, better dead than here is the attitude being taken toward many human beings escaping wars and other crises for which the European and North American countries are largely responsible, indirectly and even directly, especially in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, from where the greatest number of refugees are now fleeing.

The vessels operating in the Aegean on what is being advertised as a “patrol” are not patrol boats this time. So far the flotilla consists of a large (170-metre) combat support ship and two combat ships (frigates). While Nato officials have tried to give the impression that the flotilla was sent to “provide intelligence to the European Union,” this does not explain the choice of ships designed for coastal warfare instead of simply relying on aerial surveillance, which in fact is being stepped up as part of this operation. (The New York Times, 12 February 2016, is the source of all the misleading statements quoted above.) What “intelligence”? Everyone knows that people are pouring into Europe through these waters and the governments want to stop them.

The mission is definitely not aimed at “human traffickers”, “a criminal syndicate that is exploiting these poor people,” as US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, German Defence Minister Urusla von der Leyen and Nato-friendly media outlets claimed. (Deutsche Welle, 11 February 2016) Most people entering Europe are not being trafficked into slavery, or trafficked in any real sense at all. They are escaping. It is intolerable that this difference be deliberately ignored by the world’s biggest exploiters, the powers whose human trafficking slave ships plied the seas and filled the oceans with the bodies of kidnapped Africans whose only escape was death. This went on for hundreds of years as they began to accumulate the capital that allows them to dominate the world today.

Yet while people crossing the Mediterranean have been acting on their own, still, as individuals and even collectively they are reacting to desperate choices largely imposed on them by the workings of the imperialist capitalist system itself. The immense flood of fleeing human beings in the world today, estimated at 60 million, is far more the result of compulsion, in that sense, than a question of individual decisions. Whether or not some entrepreneur – whose morals are at worst no different than, say, Western bankers – sells them a rubber dingy is not going to change that situation. If the West really wanted to help people, they would send ferries to bring them safely across the waters, just as the US and Europe routinely sends ships to evacuate their citizens, when that suits them, trapped in war zones – as people in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and many other places surely are.

Quiet political events leading up to the sudden Nato decision shed light on the shadowy political manoeuvring. On 7 February, German Chancellor Angel Merkel and French President Francois Hollande dined together and came up with a “roadmap” for radically reducing the number of people now entering Europe. (Le Monde, 11 February 2016) Some of it is to be presented to an upcoming EU meeting, but much of it is already being implemented. Greece has been given three months to re-establish its sea borders or be thrown out of the Shengen group of European countries supposedly set up to guarantee free travel through most of the continent. Of course, Germany, Sweden and other countries have now largely closed their border, flaunting the Shengen agreement.

The great difficulty in getting out of Greece now, due to European border closings, has turned that country, especially the islands near Turkey, into what a UN official called “the world’s largest open air detention centre.” The EU pushed for the establishment of euphemistically called “hot spots” in Greece and Italy. People have been detained by force in stadiums and other facilities on repeated occasions, but the main reason they have to stay in the centres now being established is that they have nowhere else to go, to eat and get out of the freezing rain – and not be beaten by rampaging anti-immigrant civilians. Greece and Italy, which gave other countries so many millions of their people for so long, are becoming doorkeepers of Fortress Europe.

The stated purpose of these centres is to identify and register all arrivals. They are sorted out between those who could be considered candidates for asylum in Europe, basically Syrians, and those from countries declared “safe” like Afghanistan, as Germany recently did. This decision has a particularly nasty resonance among politically awake people in Germany, who have condemned the country’s continuing and now leading role in the occupation of Afghanistan, under the US. Among other things, it is a hypocritical violation (better said, exposure) of Germany’s post-World War 2 so-called “pacifist” constitution.

Meanwhile, according to Le Monde, Greece has agreed to ship the victims of this “sorting” back to Turkey. Turkey has agreed to accept them – perhaps everyone, even the Afghans. (Duetsche Welle, 11 February 2016) In return, Turkey is to get a much quicker disbursement of the three billion euros the EU will pay it to warehouse refugees – more than a thousand euros per soul so far. Also in turn, Turkey asked for Nato to step into the Aegean, a move whose implications go far beyond the migrant question.

All this helps understand the strategic intent of the Nato flotilla and the hastiness of its launching as other elements come together in an extremely volatile situation.

This volatility may explain the haziness of the Nato mission, to the degree that its tactics really remain undefined and officials are not just feeding disinformation to the open mouths of the media. It can’t be considered separately from the collision between the US, Europe and Russia over Syria, or Turkey’s extremely aggressive and precarious position as both the West’s indispensable ally against Russia and the main conduit for the arms and volunteers sustaining Islamist forces on the Syrian battleground.

Different wars and contradictions are overlapping and interacting – including what is figuratively and not, at this time, literally, a war against “migrants”, in other words, the fleeing victims. At a minimum, the naval deployment sets a new tone for the handling of the migrant ”crisis”. It may be that Nato wants to establish a physical presence in the Aegean, a “prepositioning” as its new arms depots on the Russian border are called, ready for action if sudden changes in the military situation in Syria, or Turkish and more foreign military intervention, or crisis in Turkey itself, turn the flood of refugees into a tidal wave. What remains to be seen is how much it will actively seek to turn the Aegean into a European separation wall.

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Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.